"In the early 1920s, one George Halas turned to Charles Bidwill, a bootlegger, gambler, racetrack owner, and associate of Chicago’s Al (Scarface) Capone’s mob, to finance the Chicago Bears. Later, Bidwill bought the Chicago Cardinals. The Bidwill family now owns the Arizona Cardinals.

In 1925, bookie Tim Mara bought the New York Giants. His heirs still have half the team. Notorious gambler Art Rooney took over the Pittsburgh Steelers. His family still controls the team; the Rooney empire is purportedly breaking up so that the racetracks and casinos won’t be mixed with the football team.

In the sport’s first half-century, one team after another was owned by high rollers, often with sordid connections. The Cleveland Browns were owned by crime syndicate bookmaker Arthur (Mickey) McBride, head of the Continental Racing Wire, the mob’s gambling news service. The U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee called that news service “Public Enemy Number One.”

In 1961, the team was sold to Art Modell, who, among many things, was a partner in a horse-racing stable with one Morris (Mushy) Wexler, whom the Kefauver Committee named one of the “leading hoodlums” in McBride’s wire service. In 1969, Modell got married in the Las Vegas digs of William (Billy) Weinberger, president of Caesars Palace, whose hidden owners included such dignitaries as Tony (Big Tuna) Accardo, Sam (Momo) Giancana, and Vincent (Jimmy Blue Eyes) Alo. When he died in 1996, the Las Vegas Sun called Weinberger “the dean of casino gaming.”

The Chargers were founded by longtime gambler Barron Hilton, who had both a business and personal relationship with Los Angeles attorney Sidney Korshak, who was described by law enforcement officials as “the link between the legitimate business world and organized crime.” A later owner was Eugene Klein, another Korshak friend with mob and gambling associations.

The late Carroll Rosenbloom, a high roller with a major interest in a mobbed-up Bahamian casino, owned the Baltimore Colts and Los Angeles Rams at different times. His second wife and widow, entertainer Georgia Frontiere — who had been married five times before latching on to Rosenbloom — inherited control of the Rams and moved them to St. Louis when she got a stadium 96 percent funded by taxpayers.

The Youngstown DeBartolo family, long involved in casinos and racetracks, owns the San Francisco 49ers. In the late 1990s, Edward DeBartolo Jr., then head of the 49ers, paid a Louisiana governor $400,000 to get a riverboat casino license. The governor went to the slammer; DeBartolo got a wrist slap but had to leave the 49ers."

Buy the book: Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football

Providing info...if people are interested in learning about the real history of the NFL and its current ties to gambling and the NFL's precarious and hypocritical stance on gambling - and how gambling on the NFL is its lifebloood and how it boosts viewership by 40-50%....and the long fears that there has been game fixing....buy the book.